Asus R.O.G. Maximus Formula pictured

A Taiwanese forum has got their hands of several high-quality pictures of the upcoming Asus Republic of Gamers, Maximus Formula motherboard. It's got a massive heatsink covering the chipset and it's connected to another heatsink that vents the heat out of the case via the I/O panel. There are several heatpipes connecting the various heatsinks on the motherboard, but it looks like Asus has gone for a traditional PWM design instead of using a digital PWM design like DFI, which takes up a lot less space on the board.

The board itself doesn't look that amazing though, it's got two x16 PCI Express 2.0 slots, two x1 slots and a third black slot for Asus audio riser card, as well as two PCI slots. Around the back are six USB ports, a FireWire port, a PS/2 port for a keyboard, two Ethernet connectors and S/PDIF out connectors, but no eSATA which is a real bummer.

It's got the usual R.O.G. features such as a rear CMOS reset button, onboard power and reset buttons as well as the little LCD display that came with the Blitz series. It has six SATA connectors as well as a single IDE and a floppy connector. It lacks any kind of connectivity for parallel and serial ports, so forget about using your old hardware with this board.

We're not going to jump the gun here and say that this is a bad board until we see the bundle and the performance numbers, but it's something of an anticlimax seeing this board. Some Euro pricing has appeared in Germany and the board will be retailing there for about 300, which is about US$400, which makes this an insanely expensive board.